Seminar Series: Research Strategies to Increase Vaccine Uptake
WINTER/SPRING 2025-2026
Communicating to Improve Vaccine Uptake in the Clinical Encounter
Robert M. Jacobson, MD
T Denny Sanford Professor of Pediatrics, Mayo Clinic
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 12:00 - 1:00 PM
Arthur H. Rubenstein Auditorium
Smilow Center For Translational Research
3400 Civic Center Boulevard, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Robert M. Jacobson, MD, seeks to improve health outcomes of empaneled primary care patients through interventions at a population level. Dr. Jacobson's research focuses on improved vaccine uptake at the population level. He focuses on interventions that healthcare organizations, such as Mayo Clinic, can pursue rather than interventions pursued by public health organizations or insurers. These interventions often operate outside of healthcare professionals' encounters with patients but complement those efforts rather than compete with them. Dr. Jacobson collaborates closely with researchers at Mayo Clinic through the Population Health Science Scholars Program, which is a joint effort between the Division of Epidemiology and the primary care collaboration at Mayo Clinic. The primary care collaboration involves community internal medicine, family medicine, and community pediatric and adolescent medicine.
Finding Common Ground: A Panel Discussion with Health Communicators
Lisa Rosenbaum, MD, National Correspondent, New England Journal of Medicine, Moderator
Brinda Adhikari, Host, Why Should I Trust You podcast
Jessica B. Steier, DrPH, PMP, Host, Unbiased Science podcast
Rachael Bedard, MD, Senior Director, Geriatrics and Complex Care Service, Correctional Health Services, New York Health+Hospitals
Dhruv Khullar, MD, MPP, Practicing Physician at Weill Cornell Medical College and Contributing Writer for The New Yorker
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 12:00 - 1:00 PM
BRB II/III Auditorium
Biomedical Research Building
421 Curie Blvd, Philadelphia, PA 1910
Correcting False Beliefs: Using the Science of Learning to Improve Misinformation Debunks
Lisa Fazio, PhD
Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of Psychology and Human Development,
Vanderbilt University
TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 12:00 - 1:00 PM
Arthur H. Rubenstein Auditorium
Smilow Center For Translational Research
3400 Civic Center Boulevard, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Lisa Fazio, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on how children and adults learn true and false information from the world around them, and on how to correct errors in people’s knowledge. Her work spans multiple disciplines including cognitive, developmental, educational, and social psychology and informs basic theories about psychological processes, while also having clear applications for practitioners, such as journalists and teachers. She received the Vanderbilt Chancellor's Research Award in 2025, the Early Career Impact Award from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences in 2020 and the Frank Research Prize in Public Interest Communications in 2017. Dr. Fazio is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Psychonomic Society, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
Vaccines and the Politics of Personal Responsibility
Jennifer Reich, PhD
Professor of Sociology and Director, University Honors and Leadership Program
University of Colorado Denver
TUESDAY, MAY 12, 12:00 - 1:00 PM
BRB II/III Auditorium
Biomedical Research Building
421 Curie Blvd, Philadelphia, PA 1910
Jennifer Reich, PhD, examines how individuals and families strategize their interactions with the state and service providers in the context of public policy, particularly as they relate to health and welfare. She is author of two award-winning books, Fixing Families: Parents, Power, and the Child Welfare System (2005) and Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines (2016), co-editor of the book, Reproduction and Society (2014), and has written 45 articles and book chapters that explore gender and inequality in child welfare, childhood vaccinations, reproduction, multiracial families, public assistance, and recovery after disaster. In addition to teaching in Sociology, Dr. Reich serves as Director of CU Denver’s University Honors and Leadership Program.
View recordings from past seminars:
FALL 2025
Strategies for Communicating with Vaccine-Hesitant Parents
Sean O’Leary, MD, MPH
Professor, Pediatrics-Infectious Diseases, University of Colorado School of Medicine
Director, Colorado Children’s Outcomes Network
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2:00-3:00 pm
Arthur H. Rubenstein Auditorium
Smilow Center For Translational Research
3400 Civic Center Boulevard, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Sean O’Leary, MD, MPH, is a Pediatric Infectious Diseases specialist and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado. He practiced as a general pediatrician in Fort Collins, Colorado, for 8 years. Dr. O’Leary is the director of the Colorado Children’s Outcomes Network, Colorado’s pediatric practice-based research network. His research focuses on identifying barriers to vaccination and developing and testing interventions to address those barriers. He serves as the liaison to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices for the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society. He is also on the American Academy of Pediatrics’s Committee on Infectious Diseases (Red Book Committee). He serves as a co-chair of the Policy Committee for the Colorado Children’s Immunization Coalition and co-chair of the Immunization Committee for the Colorado Chapter of the AAP. Dr. O’Leary received a BA in Environmental Studies from Brown University and graduated from University of Texas Houston Medical School. He completed his pediatric residency at The Children's Hospital in Denver.
View the recording!
The Politicization of Science and its Implications for Vaccine Uptake: Politicians, Conservative Media, and the Far Right
Yotam Ophir, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Communication, University at Buffalo
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2:00-3:00 pm:
BRB II/III Auditorium
Biomedical Research Building
421 Curie Blvd, Philadelphia, PA 1910
No registration required.
Attend in-person or virtually (Email pmcri@pennmedicine.upenn.edu for Zoom link)
Coffee and refreshments will be served.
Yotam Ophir, PhD, studies political and science communication—specifically, media effects, persuasion, misinformation, conspiracy theories and extremism—using mixed-method approaches, including computational text mining, network analysis, experiments, and surveys. Dr. Ophir’s coauthored book, “Democracy amid Crises: Polarization, Pandemic, Protests, & Persuasion” was published in 2022 by Oxford University Press. His sole-authored book “Misinformation & Society” is expected to be published in 2025. Dr. Ophir is the head of the Media Effects, Misinformation, and Extremism lab at the University at Buffalo, a member of UB’s Center for Information Integrity, and a distinguished fellow at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his MA and BA from the University of Haifa, Israel and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.
WINTER/SPRING 2025
Uncovering the Context for Vaccine Communication in Outbreaks
Monica Schoch-Spana, PhD, CPH
Professor of Community Health, Department of Health and Behavioral Sciences, Texas A&M University
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2:00 - 3:00 pm
BRB II/III Auditorium
Biomedical Research Building
421 Curie Blvd, Philadelphia, PA 19104
No registration required.
Attend in-person or virtually (Email pmcri@pennmedicine.upenn.edu for Zoom link)
Coffee and refreshments will be served.
Monica Schoch-Spana, PhD, CPH, a medical anthropologist and public health researcher, is Professor of Community Health in the Department of Health and Behavioral Sciences and the Director for the Community Health Degree program at Texas A&M University. For over 25 years, she has conducted research on public health emergency management, focusing on community resilience, behaviorally realistic emergency planning, public engagement in disaster planning, and crisis and emergency risk communication. She has also worked diligently to translate scholarly research into actionable recommendations for policymakers and practitioners, including as Principal Investigator for CommuniVax – a national rapid ethnographic research coalition that partnered with local communities of color to tackle COVID-19 vaccine access and acceptance issues and put equity at the center of the pandemic recovery process. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from Johns Hopkins University and is certified in public health by the National Board of Public Health Examiners.
What Works to Increase Vaccine Uptake
Noel T. Brewer, PhD
Gillings Distinguished Professor in Public Health, Gillings School of Global Public Health, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 3:00 - 4:00 pm:
Law Auditorium
Jordan Medical Education Center, 5th Floor
3400 Civic Center Blvd, Philadelphia, PA 19104
No registration required.
Attend in-person or virtually (Email pmcri@pennmedicine.upenn.edu for Zoom link)
Coffee and refreshments will be served.
Noel T. Brewer, PhD, is a behavioral scientist who studies vaccination, tobacco cessation, and other health behaviors. He serves as a voting member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and leads a WHO working group on measuring the behavioral and social drivers of vaccination. Dr. Brewer has advised on HPV vaccination for the President’s Cancer Panel under Presidents Obama and Trump and to the Biden Cancer initiative.
The Behavioral Science of Vaccine Uptake
Gretchen Chapman, PhD
Department Head and Professor, Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University
TUESDAY, MAY 6, 2:00 - 3:00 pm:
Smilow Center for Translational Research SCTR 12-146
3400 Civic Center Blvd, Philadelphia, PA 19104
No registration required.
Attend in-person or virtually (Email pmcri@pennmedicine.upenn.edu for Zoom link)
Coffee and refreshments will be served.
Gretchen Chapman, PhD, has been a Professor in Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University since 2017. Her research goal is to illuminate the psychological processes underlying decision making and to harness these findings in the design of theoretically-motivated, policy-relevant interventions to facilitate healthy and prosocial behavior such as vaccination and blood donation. Dr. Chapman's research combines the fields of judgment and decision making and health psychology. Using both laboratory and field experiments, she tests behavioral interventions, simultaneously exploring the theoretical mechanisms of decision making and also yielding policy insights into methods for improving health behavior and health outcomes. Dr. Chapman is the recipient of an APA early career award and a NJ Psychological Association Distinguished Research Award, a fellow of APA and APS. She is a former senior editor at Psychological Science, a past president of the Society for Judgment & Decision Making, the author of more than 100 journal articles, and the recipient of 20 years of continuous external funding.
FALL 2025
Public Health in Crisis
Peter Marks, MD, PhD
Former Director, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, FDA
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 9, 12:00-1:00 pm
Arthur H. Rubenstein Auditorium
Smilow Center For Translational Research
3400 Civic Center Boulevard, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Lunch will be served. Attend in-person or virtually.
In-person attendees, please RSVP here.
If attending in person, a registration is required so we can have an accurate count for lunch.
If attending virtually, please email pmcri@pennmedicine.upenn.edu for the Zoom link.
Peter Marks, MD, PhD, received his graduate degree in cell and molecular biology and his medical degree at New York University. Following this, he completed an Internal Medicine residency and Hematology/Medical Oncology fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where he subsequently joined the attending staff as a clinician-scientist and eventually served as Clinical Director of Hematology. He then moved on to work for several years in the pharmaceutical industry on the clinical development of hematology and oncology products prior to returning to academic medicine at Yale University where he led the Adult Leukemia Service and served as Chief Clinical Officer of Smilow Cancer Hospital. He joined the FDA in 2012 as Deputy Center Director for the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research and became Center Director in January 2016, a position he held until March 2025. Dr. Marks is board certified in internal medicine, hematology, and medical oncology, and is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians.
Telling Stories, Saving Lives: Utilizing Narrative Persuasion to Dispel Myths and Increase Vaccine Uptake
Sheila Teresa Murphy, PhD
Professor of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2025, 12:00 – 1:00 pm
Annenberg School for Communication, Room 500
3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Sheila Murphy, PhD explores how individual level factors (e.g., education, age, gender), interpersonal factors (e.g., social networks), community level factors (e.g., healthcare availability) and cultural level factors (e.g., social norms and beliefs) impact decision-making. For the past 20 years, Dr. Murphy has focused on the role of narrative or storytelling in shaping the public’s knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Most recently, she and her colleagues conducted experimental research on factors such as identification with fictional characters and how being "transported into" a story can overcome objections to potentially threatening health information (e.g., e-cigarette risk, genetic information, and drug side effects). During the recent COVID pandemic, Dr. Murphy and her colleagues developed three short narratives to dispel common vaccine myths and increase adult and child vaccination nationwide. Dr. Murphy has also worked with scriptwriters of popular television shows and evaluated the impact of numerous health storylines on popular television (including Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, ER, Law & Order, Chicago Med, East Los High and several Spanish language telenovelas on Telemundo and Univision) with Hollywood, Health and Society, which is also housed at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC. Internationally, Dr. Murphy has worked on a variety of award-winning Entertainment Education projects in which health information was embedded into popular programming for the express purpose of promoting a particular health outcome such as condom normalization in India, anti-sex trafficking in Indonesia, and increasing cervical cancer prevention worldwide. Dr. Murphy has received numerous awards including the Gamechanger Award and the Everett Rogers Award by the American Public Health Association. She was elected a Fellow of the International Communication Association in recognition of distinguished scholarly contributions to the field of communication.
Large language models as disruptors of medical misinformation
Thomas Costello, PhD
Assistant Professor, Social and Decision Sciences and Affiliated Faculty at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Research Affiliate, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2025, 12:00 – 1:00 pm
Annenberg School for Communication, Room 500
3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Attend in-person or virtually (Email pmcri@pennmedicine.upenn.edu for Zoom link)
Thomas Costello, PhD, integrates psychology, political science, and human-computer interaction to examine where our viewpoints come from, how they differ from person to person, and why they change. He also studies the sweeping impacts of artificial intelligence on these belief- and society-related processes. Dr. Costello has published many research papers in peer-reviewed outlets, including Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Bulletin, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences. He has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, BBC World News, and NPR. Dr. Costello developed DebunkBot.com, a public tool for combatting conspiracy theories with AI. Dr. Costello has been awarded the Rising Star award from the Association for Psychological Science, the Klarman Fellowship from Cornell University, the Heritage Dissertation Research Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the JS Tanaka Dissertation Award from the Association for Research in Personality.